Legenda Newshttp://www.legendabooks.com/news
New books in the modern Humanities from LegendaFri, 18 Dec 2015 15:16:47 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1From the Guadalajara Book Fairhttp://www.legendabooks.com/news/2015/12/18/from-the-guadalajara-book-fair/
Fri, 18 Dec 2015 15:16:47 +0000http://www.legendabooks.com/news/?p=350Continue reading »]]>When a book is written about you, you’re framed by it. Ana Clavel is now a Mexican multimedia writer — but the term “multimedia writer” is not hers, but was coined by Jane Lavery, author of The Art of Ana Clavel. At the Guadalajara Book Fair, Ana reflects on this, at about 30 minutes into a wide-ranging interview.

Our book was only the first. Ana seems to be in the process of becoming a canonical figure, as this article in El Universal goes to show.

There can’t be many major cities with five As in the name. I wonder if the local delicacy is taramasalata?

]]>¡Son Yambú!http://www.legendabooks.com/news/2015/12/03/son-yambu/
Thu, 03 Dec 2015 22:27:12 +0000http://www.legendabooks.com/news/?p=346Continue reading »]]>Our thanks to the Instituto Cervantes in Eaton Square, London, for hosting a truly memorable book launch. Katia Chornik presented her new study Alejo Carpentier and the Musical Text as part of the Instituto’s series of lectures on winners of the Cervantes Prize — Spain’s Booker Prize, except that the award is almost a state occasion, and that it goes to writers rather than single books. With slightly suspicious exactness, the award tends to go half and half to writers from inside and outside Spain. Carpentier, the second ever winner in 1977, was a proud Cuban.

In his fiction, Carpentier was what we would now call a magical realist, and music has a talismanic role throughout his work. Brought up in a musical family (his father, I’m interested to find, was taught the cello by Pablo Casals), and trained as a composer himself, Carpentier nevertheless saw music as more than the European tradition.

You sometimes have to wonder what the authors we write about would think of our books, if they could come back to life to attend the launch. (Would Goethe have enjoyed reading about his extreme old age, for example?) But I’m fairly sure Carpentier, a great champion of Afro-Cuban rhythms, would have liked this one. Katia appeared alongside the stunning Son Yambu, and here she is playing violin with them after her lecture, when the chairs had been cleared away for dancing. Beside her is Sue Miller, a Leeds-based musicologist who’s an authority on Cuban charanga flute. (Yambú is the original Cuban rumba, and charanga is a sort of skirling, partly improvised jazz.)

It was quite the ensemble, and take my word for it, they would have lifted the roof off the building if we hadn’t been in a basement auditorium.

Having worked with Katia on what’s mainly a literary study, I hadn’t realised that a major area of interest for her is the role of music as a form of resistance, active or passive, against abuses of human rights. Here are Katia and Sue playing the Internationale, a song which features prominently in Carpentier’s La consagración de la primavera:

Though I don’t think we actually clenched our fists in honour of the Cuban Revolution, Katia really did stir up the audience to sing the words, some of us in English, others in Spanish. To be honest, I think we were shamed into it; when you’ve just been told about prisoners in Chilean torture cells singing the Internationale, it seems less cool to do the English thing and be too embarrassed to sing in public.

]]>Carpentier launch on 23 Novemberhttp://www.legendabooks.com/news/2015/11/09/carpentier-launch-on-23-november/
Mon, 09 Nov 2015 17:07:49 +0000http://www.legendabooks.com/news/?p=343Continue reading »]]>We are pleased to announce that Katia Chornik’s new book Alejo Carpentier and the Musical Text will be launched on 23 November at the Instituto Cervantes in Eaton Square, London: as part of the event, Katia will give a talk on Carpentier’s blurring of genres. All are welcome.

Details can be found at the Instituto Cervantes website here. We are very grateful to the Instituto for this opportunity, and also to our good friends at the Embassy of Spain for their support and encouragement.

]]>El Universalhttp://www.legendabooks.com/news/2015/07/29/el-universal/
Wed, 29 Jul 2015 09:04:51 +0000http://www.legendabooks.com/news/?p=337Continue reading »]]>The leading Mexican paper El Universal seems a very appropriately-named venue for an article and a podcast about Jane Lavery’s new book on Ana Clavel, which keen readers of this blog will know has been covered, well, universally. Here’s the written word:

]]>Echo’s Voice Heardhttp://www.legendabooks.com/news/2015/06/17/echos-voice-heard/
Wed, 17 Jun 2015 11:39:55 +0000http://www.legendabooks.com/news/?p=334Continue reading »]]>We congratulate Mary Noonan, author of our 2014 book Echo’s Voice: The Theatres of Sarraute, Duras, Cixous and Renaude, on being shortlisted by TaPRA, the Theatre and Performance Research Association, for their big annual prize: the 2015 David Bradby Award for Research in International Theatre and Performance.

Just this week the book has also had a substantial article in H-France Review (PDF). Not just echoes, but reverberations.

]]>Event: Ana Clavel in Conversationhttp://www.legendabooks.com/news/2015/06/15/event-ana-clavel-in-conversation/
Mon, 15 Jun 2015 16:38:01 +0000http://www.legendabooks.com/news/?p=330Continue reading »]]>Late breaking news: the Guardian newspaper is running an event in London in the evening on Friday 19 June 2015, 7pm – 8.15pm, featuring Ana Clavel in conversation with our author Jane Lavery! (See her book The Art of Ana Clavel, which has been much in the news recently.) Clavel is a dynamic and challenging figure, both as a writer and a multimedia artist, and this is sure to be an intriguing dialogue.

The event takes place at the Guardian Media Group, London N1 9GU: admission £5.

]]>A Farewell to Zapfhttp://www.legendabooks.com/news/2015/06/09/a-farewell-to-zapf/
Tue, 09 Jun 2015 15:02:06 +0000http://www.legendabooks.com/news/?p=326Continue reading »]]>The legendary font designer Hermann Zapf died last week at the age of 96. Many users of his most ubiquitous font, Zapf Dingbats, probably thought Zapf was a nonsense word: after all, Dingbats certainly is. The “diamond flower” symbol used as an ornament in Legenda’s chapter headings is lower case “v” in the Zapf Dingbats font:

(The rest of the typography here uses regular, italic and semibold weights of Bembo MT Pro, named after Pietro Bembo, an Italian Renaissance author.)

“Dingbat” is an American coinage going back to 1838, according to the OED, which helpfully defines it as “= THINGUMMY (cf. DINGUS)”. It entered use in typography at least as early as 1921, when Hyde’s Handbook for Newspaper Workers gave the definition: “Dingbats, heavy, wavy pieces of cut-off rule sometimes used beneath banner headlines. Also applies to any ornament.” Zapf was three in 1921, so he and the word most often put after his name were about of an age.

A hopeless soldier, Zapf spent the second world war as a cartographer (in spite of being dismissed from the artillery for confusing right and left), and it was only in the 1940s and 1950s that he rose to prominence. But the computer age made him an immortal, when his 1948 font Palatino was shipped free with laser printers and Macintoshes in the 1980s. Zapf is also survived by Optima, Euler and a dozen others.

]]>Ah… la magia digitalhttp://www.legendabooks.com/news/2015/05/12/ah-la-magia-digital/
Tue, 12 May 2015 13:42:12 +0000http://www.legendabooks.com/news/?p=323Continue reading »]]>This blog is in danger of becoming a Guardian-politics-style live blog if it’s going to keep up with appearances of Jane Lavery’s new book on Ana Clavel: but here’s another, in Domingo, the arts supplement of Mexico’s leading paper El Universal.

]]>Less Loved, More Readhttp://www.legendabooks.com/news/2015/05/03/less-loved-more-read/
Sun, 03 May 2015 10:51:46 +0000http://www.legendabooks.com/news/?p=319Continue reading »]]>Authors quite often ask us if we publish translations of our books in other countries. The answer is no — though our books are distributed worldwide in English, we don’t ourselves produce further editions in other languages. But we do sometimes enter into agreements with publishers in different markets.

We wish Classiques Garnier well with the French edition, and of course we congratulate Maria.

]]>Postcard from Little Mexicohttp://www.legendabooks.com/news/2015/04/26/postcard-from-little-mexico/
Sun, 26 Apr 2015 19:29:26 +0000http://www.legendabooks.com/news/?p=316Continue reading »]]>Jane Lavery, author of our new book on Ana Clavel (see yesterday’s post), sends us a postcard from this year’s London Book Fair, which had an impressive focus on Mexico:

Our fine distributors, Oxbow/Casemate, who were exhibiting at the Fair, seized the moment and took this portrait: